The election battle for Rooty Hill

When
Julia Gillard
announced the federal election would be held on September 14, she said she would spend the next six months or so governing. Instead, the announcement of the distant election date fired the starting gun on the election campaign itself.

And from this weekend it will be concentrated in western Sydney through the Prime Minister’s extended foray into the key election battleground, as revealed this week by The Australian Financial Review’s political correspondent Phillip Coorey. Already, much of the rest of Australia is getting to know Rooty Hill.

Western Sydney is important because of the gaggle of marginal seats that Labor has to hold in its traditional heartland if it is to have any chance of retaining power. But it also serves as a microcosm of modern Australia that is crying out for a credible story about how politicians can help genuinely improve their lives.

The suburban region of 2 million people or so reflects the diversity of modern Australia. It has among the biggest mortgage bills as a proportion of income, the highest concentration of single parents and the highest proportion of immigrants. With its McMansion-lined precincts, it is no longer the caricature of “bogan’’ westies. And shifting demographics and economic change have blurred the old image of western Sydney as the place for workers who commute to factories and building sites, and who depend on unions for wage increases. Instead, many of them have million-dollar homes, small businesses and substantial superannuation balances.

In the words of former prime minister
Paul Keating
, western Sydney is more the home of the aspirational class which, he laments, was created by Labor’s economic reforms of the 1980s and 90s but which has been forgotten by today’s union-dominated Labor government. As former Labor leader
Mark Latham
writes elsewhere in these pages, the people of western Sydney have lost faith in Labor because they no longer support “the working class template of government regulation, subsidisation and state-led development’’.

Self-employed plumbers and electricians, building contractors or those who run their own shops or have built up very large businesses are just as likely to be living in that area as the “solidarity forever’’ working class that Labor clings to.

And it is increasingly home to professional services: accounting firm Deloitte this week announced it would double its workforce in Parramatta to 500 by 2015.

Like the rest of Australia, this growing area needs answers on the three sharp questions that today’s political class needs to confront. First, the political class needs to deal with the economy’s high cost burden and low productivity growth that have been exposed by the strong dollar and which are imposing an intense competitive squeeze on much of Australian business. This is a direct threat to the jobs and living standards of the people of western Sydney, as it is to those in the rest of the nation. Second, the political class needs to deal with the cost of living pressures that are eating into the undoubted prosperity of modern Australia. The strong dollar is spreading the mining boom wealth to western Sydney and beyond by cutting the price of imported cars, electrical appliances and food. But high domestic cost pressures are showing up in sharply rising prices for staples such as electricity, gas and rents.

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Along with an answer to our low productivity and rising cost structure, Australians want governments to help deliver the basics of good infrastructure, good schools and good health services. This issue is amplified in western Sydney because the people there struggle with the most congested and most expensive commuter trips in the nation.

Neither side of politics has credible answers to these questions, in part because they do not want to admit that they include some hard decisions. Before the 2010 election, Ms Gillard tried to avoid the whole question by junking
Kevin Rudd
’s support for a “big Australia’’, suddenly appearing in western Sydney with a promise of a still-undelivered railway line. Ms Gillard now retreats to the notion that she represents a traditional “Labor’’ party, Treasurer
Wayne Swan
wages a febrile class struggle against billionaires and Workplace Minister
Bill Shorten
gives personal support to militant unions that describe employers as “cannibals’’.

Yet the residents in western Sydney have far less interest in class struggle than they have in how interest rates will affect mortgage repayments, infrastructure that will help them get to work, and about education and jobs for their children. They are also just as interested in tax reform as anyone in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth or Adelaide.

Ms Gillard says she is all about Australian jobs. Yet as the Financial Review reported this week, both sides of politics are refusing to declare support for the needed second Sydney airport that would provide a genuine boost to jobs in western Sydney. While both sides dodge such serious questions, the battle for Rooty Hill will inevitably degenerate into unseemly squabbles over restricting imported labour and imposing restrictions on asylum-seekers.